ASL STEM Wiki: Dataset and Benchmark for Interpreting STEM Articles

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students face significant barriers in accessing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, notably due to the scarcity of STEM resources in signed languages. To help address this, we introduce ASL STEM Wiki: a parallel corpus of 254 Wikipedia articles on STEM topics in English, interpreted into over 300 hours of American Sign Language (ASL). ASL STEM Wiki is the first continuous signing dataset focused on STEM, facilitating the development of AI resources for STEM education in ASL. We identify several use cases of ASL STEM Wiki with human-centered applications. For example, because this dataset highlights the frequent use of fingerspelling for technical concepts, which inhibits DHH students' ability to learn, we develop models to identify fingerspelled words -- which can later be used to query for appropriate ASL signs to suggest to interpreters.

ASL Citizen: A Community-Sourced Dataset for Advancing Isolated Sign Language Recognition

Sign languages are used as a primary language by approximately 70 million D/deaf people world-wide. However, most communication technologies operate in spoken and written languages, creating inequities in access. To help tackle this problem, we release ASL Citizen, the largest Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR) dataset to date, collected with consent and containing 83,912 videos for 2,731 distinct signs filmed by 52 signers in a variety of environments. We propose that this dataset be used for sign language dictionary retrieval for American Sign Language (ASL), where a user demonstrates a sign to their own webcam with the aim of retrieving matching signs from a dictionary. We show that training supervised machine learning classifiers with our dataset greatly advances the state-of-the-art on metrics relevant for dictionary retrieval, achieving, for instance, 62% accuracy and a recall-at-10 of 90%, evaluated entirely on videos of users who are not present in the training or validation sets. An accessible PDF of this article is available at https://aashakadesai.github.io/research/ASL_Dataset__arxiv_.pdf